“Because it’s about the Arcana Viruses! I oughta help!” Kaita tried to explain over the panic.

(On his shoulder, Turboman wondered if his Operator had made the right move, but only for a moment. Everyone was following the same course now, after all, and the ride tended to be smoother that way. Besides, getting there faster was always better, in his opinion.)

At last, the ‘old man’ on the other end of the line regained temporary control of the conversation. Kaita listened intently, looking over at Lan when Wily addressed her in his explanation.

“‘Ancient crap’?” he wondered when Lan mentioned it, entirely earnest. “But, yeah. The way it got explained to me… it sounded like the program at the center of them was sucking up information from its surroundings, somehow. And that’s why they all turn out so different from each other.” He tilted his head. “But Meiru-san would’ve mentioned Dead Hand if she’d thought they knew about, y’know, the kinda stuff the Arcana Viruses have gotten up to since then…”

“Maybe they didn’t then, but they do now,” mused Turboman.

“Ah,” said Turboman, who had in fact assumed they were talking about whatever the equivalent was in Rock’s Internet.

“You really don’t have anything like it…?” wondered Kaita. He was genuinely amazed. Internet City was so old, and even discounting it there were independently-run webpages to visit, some of which were even older…

Before Kaita could reassure Lan that she was fine, her PET rang. It seemed obvious that she didn’t want to take the call, but just as obvious that she had to. Was this her version of Meijin-san…? He sounded a lot older… But he was speaking with authority about the Arcana Virus phenomenon, just like Meijin-san and Hikari-hakase would’ve to Kaita.

“Guess we’re drivin’ right into trouble,” Turboman whispered to his Operator.

“Looks like it.” Kaita didn’t really mind this turn of events; exploring the Internet and solving problems like this were what he did. But he couldn’t help but murmur, “Sorry, Hikari-san…” to the front door behind them. He hadn’t even realized what a relief it was to no longer need to lie to his parents until he found himself having lied to someone else’s. It was much more uncomfortable the second time around.

With that, Kaita stuck his head over the side so Lan and her caller could see, only to discover that said caller was voice-only. “Um, excuse me!” He turned on his Net Savior hologram on reflex, then remembered the other person couldn’t see it. “I’m Todoroki Kaita, with the Net Saviors of, uh, Beyondard!” he explained as quickly as his mind could recall the proper terms. “We’re doing research on the Arcana Viruses. Are you saying… that Dead Hand is trying to say the Arcana Viruses are theirs?”

“Yeah, Internet City!” Kaita answered Rock. “It’s a huge virtual world with lots of games and the Net Colosseum and stuff!”

“It started up a while ago now,” Turboman added. “Seven years, at least…”

Lan pointing out that they’d be able to talk more freely outside caused Kaita to nod enthusiastically in approval. “Let’s go!” He sprang to his feet and ran after her to the door, only stopping to quickly pull his shoes back onto his feet.

But Hikari-san’s interruption at the threshold, after the troubling interjection of earlier, stunned him into a momentary silence while he scrambled to figure out what to say. It wasn’t like his own mother had ever seemed to completely believe him when he tried to come up with what he could be doing that wasn’t ‘chasing down Nova’…

“We’ll stay out of trouble, Hikari-san! Promise!” he finally managed to blurt. Then, he took Lan by the wrist and marched the both of them out the door before anything else could be asked.

Once they were down the front steps and out of the lawn, Kaita could finally relax. “I think we’re in the clear!” he cheered to Lan.

Kaita felt both baffled by Hikari-san’s interruption—drugs?—and backed into a corner—‘in trouble online’ described basically everything Kaita and Turboman ever did there. He stayed huddled behind the couch, staring in the direction her voice was coming from with wide eyes.

“I guess ‘Official’ was the title before it got changed to ‘Net Savior’,” Turboman explained. “Dunno why it didn’t change for everyone else’s worlds. The new one sounds way cooler.” As Rock thought through Kaita’s example, he turned back to Kaita. “I don’t think Hikari-san was being serious.”

“Oh,” Kaita said faintly. His eyes met Lan’s before she began to throw out suggestions of what not to do.

“Not anime, and not Netbattling,” Turboman repeated for the nonexistent record, entirely serious. “Got it.”

“We could… go back outside, I guess?” Kaita suggested. “We could send our Navis to Internet City, or some other hangout spot? We could watch not-anime…”

“Why don’t you do something outdoors? Like… uh…” It was obviously taking some doing for Turboman to think of something that didn’t involve some form of vehicle. Kaita couldn’t help but smile.

“Frisbee, or soccer, or something,” he finished so his Navi didn’t have to stay stuck on it.

Now that she was seated and paying less attention to keeping the mug from spilling, Meiru noticed the burn wound. At first, the only thing that occurred to her was that it was an odd place for such a mark.

“Aw, okay,” said Roll. “Well, if you insist!” Meiru didn’t mind either way; she had her tea, and she wasn’t particularly hungry. She took a sip, looked up to watch Netto introduce himself. He seemed completely normal now, neither unaware of his own injuries or—

—Oh. That burn was in the spot she’d ripped the Link from.

“I’m… Meiru,” she began. It was hard for her to tell whether she ought to be apologizing for the burn or not. Whether Netto even remembered where it’d come from. She found herself thinking aloud more than anything. “I… really don’t know the first thing about you, do I? In my world, you’re, well, one of my best friends.”

“Netto means a lot to her. He and Rockman inspired us to fight!” Roll added. (An embarrassed cough rose from the PET on Meiru’s wrist.)

It was the truth. Meiru didn’t deny it. “I… guess that’s what’s made things so awkward. I feel like I oughta be able to talk to you, but…” She shook her head. “Which is ridiculous. I’m probably just as different from your version of me as you are to my version of you. If I even exist at all.”

Aon would definitely get a couple of odd glances for their outburst, but from Meiru and Roll they just got looks of sympathy.

“Well… yes, is the thing,” Roll began. “It’s hard to figure out how to talk to you… it’s like you’ve always got this wall up.” (And when they weren’t noticeably roiling underneath it, they seemed uncaring and cold.)

“But it makes a lot of sense, if you’re unused to working with and trusting other people,” Meiru added. “And it’s not like we’ve never seen that before, believe me! It’s a learnable skill, like anything else. If you can trust in us enough to want to get better at it, you will, with time.”

“We just need to get to know each other better,” Roll added. “And that goes for everybody on the Alpha Squad, really!” It felt quite silly to fiddle with the frappe like it was drinkable after Aon’s disappointment earlier, but Roll had gotten nowhere by being self-conscious. So she picked her ‘drink’ up in one hand and held the straw with the other. “I can let you borrow one of mine, if you’d like! Just giving your hands something to do helps sometimes when you’re tense, I think.” To illustrate, she began moving the straw as if she was breaking up ice that had formed at the bottom, like Meiru sometimes did after abandoning a frozen drink for a while.

Thinking about the things Netto had said at Via Iracunda in relation to his current self was nonsensical, at best. Still, Meiru couldn’t help a sense of foreboding, remembering this face shouting about how she didn’t get it, would never get it. It was probably true, since there was no chance of her and Roll wielding an ability like the other worlds’ versions of Synchro. (But what if she wanted to ‘get it’…?)

It was somewhat easier to remember their last conversation, if Meiru could call it that; all she clearly remembered of it was yelling at him to go get his wounds looked at as if they were a pair of twelve-year-olds, and not authorities of sorts in their respective worlds.

…Thinking it back over, she had really not been making the best of impressions, either.

“It’s okay,” she said in immediate response to Netto’s apology. “You’re still hurt. Nobody’s going to expect you to clean up after—” She could immediately think of people who would’ve expected her to keep the house clean under any circumstance, mostly family members. “Well, nobody rational would expect it.”

“You should’ve said something!” Roll protested. “We could’ve picked something up!”

“There might be something in the house, if Roll wants to try out her hand-portal idea…” Meiru suggested, only half joking. It was easier to talk to someone else if they were somewhat on the same level, in her experience, so she took a seat when Netto offered it.

“From the chatroom?!” Kaita blurted in genuine surprise.

“Kaita!” Turboman hurriedly hissed. “Keep it down—“

“F— from the chatroom?!” Kaita asked again in an undertone. “But they should know all about this kinda stuff! Aren’t they supposed to all be Net Saviors, too?!”

“…I have to admit, I’m surprised, too,” Turboman added while his Operator simmered down a bit. “It’s pretty tough to come up with a perfect answer when you’re going two hundred down a rocky road…”

“You shouldn’t feel bad about it, is what he means,” Kaita was quick to explain. “Nobody’s gonna make a perfect choice in a situation like that, and people from the chatroom oughta know it.” He offered Lan a sunny smile. “I found out all that stuff about my Netto, and it was a lot, but I still get it. He really didn’t have a shot at making a perfect choice! So, what I mean is, don’t worry about me.”

Both Kaita and Turboman nodded at Rock’s suggestion of finding something to calm Lan down. That took a moment of thinking over, since neither of them were sedate sorts of people. “Like… reading a book, or looking for some cool page on the Internet? Mary-chan knows more about calm than me, I think, but those are things she likes, so, um…” Kaita looked back to Lan. “What do you like?”

Roll frowned disapprovingly; Aon didn’t get it, and she wasn’t even sure that they had ever really wanted to. She badly wanted to performatively droop her antennae to let off some frustration as they arranged themselves into their mockery of relaxation complete with a disdainful sneer. Instead, she just shut her eyes tightly and sighed.

“You’re, uh, pretty bad at acting,” came Meiru’s sheepish voice over her shoulder. “Part of what I mean by ‘trusting’ and ‘relaxing’ is just, well, awareness. Not only of your surroundings, like in a combat situation, but of what other people might be going through.”

“Right, right,” Roll weakly agreed, still trying to regain her bearings in the face of Aon’s disjointed attempt at bluffing.

“It takes a lot of patience, doesn’t it, Roll?” said Meiru, distinctly amused.

It did, but it also took a certain level of honesty. And that was what finally got Roll to ask, “Are you sure you’re okay? You’ve seemed kinda on edge...”

Kaita listened along intently, giving Lan the same time Netto would’ve needed to complete his thoughts. “The whole Internet!” he marveled once she was done. “The one Turboman and I went to just wrecked an island. It must’ve been really hard to fix it all. That’s amazing…”

“It’s still bad attention if everyone’s just focusing on your technique instead of your victory, in my books,” Turboman added. (Though he had to admit to himself that he was a bit put out at any competition being described as ‘just a tournament’. Racing had been his whole life, once. Still, it had been so long since those days that it was easy enough to move past—it wasn’t like he could talk about it, or anything.)

“Exactly!” Kaita readily agreed. “You stopped a big crisis, but nobody said thanks properly. Of course it’s not fine!” He shook his head ferociously before correcting himself. “Well, you did it, so in that way it’s fine. But, like… if your friend’s not okay, and you’re still shook up about it, and people haven’t let everything calm down…”

Kaita was quite bewildered by Rock’s idea. “Why would Netto send me?” he wondered. “I know you paid a visit to Meiru-san, but it sounded like it went great.”

Turboman sighed and answered Rock’s question for his Operator. “Yup, we sure are.”

But to Kaita, it was obvious that what Lan was saying was way more troubling to her. “It… wasn’t worth it, then?” he asked.

Turboman authoritatively chimed in, “We—“ before rapidly backtracking. “Uh, not that I’d know or anything, but—“ Confident once more, he explained, “I’ve always heard the rewards you get after the victory lap’re pretty sweet. Prize money, some hardware for your shelf, whatever else the sponsors wanna throw in…”

“But whatever it was, it wasn’t worth the attention,” Kaita repeated with more certainty, for Turboman’s sake more than Lan’s. “That stinks…”

“Must’ve been a real lemon of a prize,” sighed Turboman.

After thinking it over a moment longer, Kaita scrunched his eyes shut and sighed, “I’m sorry.” Tilting his head from side to side as he thought, he added, “It feels like you should only get good attention from a tournament, not this bad attention…”

For someone who had struck Meiru as being so cold and inflexible in the past, Aon sure did seem like they were willing to change. It was still hard to figure out where to start, keeping what Meiru had managed to glean so far in mind. How did one explain the practical application of kindness to someone who seemed to receive so little of it?

(Roll, meanwhile, couldn’t help the suspicion that Aon thought they were getting one over on Meiru. But that was such an uncharitable thing to think! And she knew why they had to go with this approach; it was more important that Aon be inclined to consider what they were saying. Patience, patience…)

“Well… I think, fundamentally, it’s really important to extend that sort of trust that you just extended to me,” Meiru decided to begin with. “To assume the best both of the people you’re helping and the ones you’re working with.”

Roll beamed; Meiru was spot-on as ever. “It’s true!” she brightly agreed. “If you’re able to relax enough to be there for your allies, the best parts of your personality’ll shine through, and the rest will naturally follow!”

Kaita opened his mouth to say that they had in fact met online, then watched with a sort of wonder as Lan swooped in without hesitation to provide a cover story. Lan didn’t talk to Hikari-san about her friends? Did that mean this Hikari-san didn’t know about the chatroom, then? Was she just stricter, like Asuna-san, or was there something Kaita was missing here?

The most obviously missing thing was… Hikari-hakase. A touchy subject for Lan, Kaita recalled.

This Hikari-san might as well have been an entirely different person, Kaita realized. He instinctively began to follow Rock’s instruction, carefully taking a step down the hallway before realizing that ‘the couch’ might not be where he thought it was, and that Lan needed to lead the way. “A—“

Once again, Lan’s frantic interruption saved Kaita from a critical error. “Uh, right! Yeah! Let’s go find the couch, and then we can catch up!”

As Haruka blinked, Kaita blinked back. What an odd reaction. “Is everything o…”

But just like that, Hikari-san was back to her usual self. “I just felt like it!” Kaita explained brightly when she wondered. Once Lan properly revealed herself, he beamed and waved to her, Turboman waving from his shoulder.

It always felt a bit funny to be privy to someone else being talked to by their mother like that, no matter who it was. Maybe he really had caused Lan a bit too much trouble...?

He was startled from that train of thought by Lan’s worrying. “Nope, nothing at all!” he reassured her, bounding to her—

“Kaita, your shoes!” Turboman hurriedly cautioned before Kaita could make it more than two steps inside.

Kaita took an exaggeratedly large step back to the door, slipped his shoes off, then scurried on sock foot next to Lan. “Like I told Hikari-san, I just felt like it,” he said, completely honestly. “I wanted to see if I could make the trip over, that's all."

Kaita waited, looking around at the stillness of the house with open-eyed wonder. He supposed he was an unfamiliar sight around this house, but it was still taking a long time. The entire neighborhood was so much quieter than his own version of Akihara Town. Was anyone really home…?

Finally, before Kaita could try the doorbell again, the door opened. He was a bit confused by the greeting he got—what sort of a fundraiser? A Net Savior Bake Sale, maybe?—but quickly recovered.

“Hello!” Kaita cheerfully greeted. “I’m Kaita, one of Netto-chan’s friends!” This Hikari-san was different enough from the one he knew for him to remember to say, “You’re Netto-chan’s Mama, Hikari-san, aren’t you? It’s nice to meet you!” and bow politely but enthusiastically.

Kaita marveled at the Akihara Town he’d traveled to. “It… seems a lot like our own,” was Turboman’s initial impression.

“No, it’s different,” Kaita noticed. “Everything looks older.” He pointed out the house where Meiru lived in their own world. “The roof’s gray.”

“Everything’s just kind of… drab, isn’t it?” mused Turboman. “I wonder if we’ve even got our red roof, if Meiru-san’s house looks like that…”

“I don’t think Meiru-san would change it to a color like that. I wonder if she even lives here,” Kaita continued to think aloud as he turned his attention back to the house in front of them. The Hikari home was still its proper whites and blues, albeit under a layer of grime. Nobody had been out to pressure wash it in some time, it seemed, and the upstairs balcony that Kaita remembered as attaching to Netto’s room appeared to be missing. Even the shrubbery in the planter seemed more unkempt, overgrown and patchy.

Something about it filled Turboman with foreboding. “I think we’d better head back for now,” he suggested.

“Hmm…” Kaita pulled out the chatroom app on a holoscreen, still displaying the inputs he’d made to take them to the spot they stood in. “If we went here, though, that means Netto-chan’s gotta be home.” He smiled down at Turboman’s hologram. “It’s been a while since we talked! We oughta at least stop in and say hi, don’t you think?”

“That’s the nice thing to do, yeah,” Turboman couldn’t help but agree as Kaita bounded up the steps.

“Even the doorbell’s somewhere else…?” wondered Kaita, searching for and locating a much less sophisticated setup than he was used to seeing on the homes in his neighborhood. As the analog bell rang out, he marveled, “That's old-school, too…”

Roll’s concern (were they sure they were okay?) warred with her temper (they could do with making a few less assumptions about their allies in general, couldn’t they?) in her core. But she could hear Meiru’s smooth smile in her response of, “Ah, you’re welcome! It’s what a teammate ought to do, isn’t it?” and followed her Operator’s example in letting the more acerbic thought go.

Roll nodded along with Aon’s other observation. “I see… It still sounds like for more dangerous cases, you really do kinda work on your own...” That level of coordination was, after all, what she and Blues pulled off every day at the minimum.

“You’re in the right place if you’d like some advice, though!” Meiru cheerfully said. “Not to toot our own horns, but Roll-chan and I are kind of great at public outreach! It's why we were first brought on board, after all.”

“People want their concerns to truly be heard, I think,” Roll mused. She’d had quite a few years to think on what worked and what didn’t, after all. “For what we’re doing to feel like it’s being done with both kindness and panache. ‘Like on a Sunday-morning superhero show’, I think Meijin-san said once…”

It was a slow day, both at school and at the auto shop, and Kaita had half a mind to wander to the Ministry out of boredom before he remembered the chatroom. He opened it to find that, once again, not only had he totally missed when everyone had been online, but they’d also gotten into a subject way, way over his head.

“The future?” Kaita wondered aloud, lounging upside-down on his bedroom bean bag chair. “A giant meteor in the future? Wow…” He let his arm drop to the ground instead of holding it out in front of him; the chatroom window remained where it was, despite the tapping of the PET case against the floor.

Turboman, still projecting himself upside-up like a stick-in-the-mud, bent sideways at the waist to read for himself about the ‘vintage PETs’ and ‘EM Bodies’. “At least they don’t seem to be trying to get their hands on those vaults that have Hikari-hakase all stalled out,” he pointed out.

“If they shoved a giant meteor through the portals, would we need to go on standby for that, too?” Kaita wondered idly. There was no sign of the Netto-chan he’d met in the chatroom, either, though that lonely notepad person had come back.

“What would we be able to do about a giant meteor?” Turboman asked incredulously. “Wouldn’t you call ANSA about that, and not us?”

“It’s emitting some kind of noise,” Kaita pointed out. “So it’s obviously got something funny about it…” Reminded that there was a solution to his boredom sitting right there on his wrist, Kaita reached up to grab at the chatroom screen, navigating back to its main menu.

“What’re you lookin’ for?” Turboman wondered, noticing the new upswing in his Operator’s energy.

“I’ve got nowhere to be, so now’s my shot,” Kaita decided. “I’m gonna try the portals out for myself!”

While Kaita carefully tapped UI buttons, Turboman wondered, “Should we tell someone first, or…” The portal, tall enough for a fully-sized adult, snapped open in front of his hologram. “Whoa.” Turboman’s eyes, already pinpricks of light beneath his visor, seemed to shimmer a little.

“I wonder if I can make it smaller,” mused Kaita; the portal shut with a snap of displaced air and a shimmery, sci-fi whoosh as he navigated over to where the settings ought to be.

The next few minutes were spent on the issues of size, placement, and shape; square, round, the size of an eraser, next to the tree in the backyard and just as tall…

“Cool… I mean, maybe we should close it! Before someone sees us!” Turboman fretted.

“Okaaaay…” A bit reluctantly, Kaita disappeared the huge rift in spacetime in front of their window. It had been kind of funny, honestly. “Well, they could put a small meteor in it, that’s for sure,” he concluded. “…Okay, next up.”

“Next up?!” boggled Turboman, but there was no stopping Kaita in the throes of boredom. A new portal opened, this one resolving into a very familiar neighborhood. If Turboman hadn’t known better, he would’ve said that Kaita had simply opened a portal that would take them a couple of streets down from where they were. “I guess it’s not too bad if you’re just taking us for a lap around the neighborhood…”

“It’s Netto-chan’s Akihara Town!” Kaita explained, climbing to his feet and retrieving his backpack. “What better place to see what going through a portal’s like for ourselves, right?!”

“Your Mama’s gonna kill me…” complained Turboman as Kaita lined himself up for a jump.

“Here… we… go!” And with that, Kaita was through, Turboman’s hologram pulled along for the ride as his PET went along with his Operator.

“What? Of course not!” Roll immediately protested, genuinely taken aback. “We wouldn’t be here if we did!“

Meiru, too, was surprised at how quickly Aon had taken offense. But she rallied and explained, “Part of trusting a teammate is giving them the space to be vulnerable while still believing in their capabilities, Aon-san. Roll and I wanted to thank you for extending that trust to us, that’s all. Nothing else intended.”

“It’s just that—correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you’re more used to working on your own,” Roll mused. She didn’t speculate on whether that was from preference or necessity; the latter could’ve shaped the former, from what they’d heard so far.

Meiru watched Aon try to wriggle their way out of confirming her conclusion, indirectly confirming it anyway. They seemed nervous again as they asked after the Arcana Viruses… or maybe they’d meant to ask after the people who were likely to cause trouble…?

“Well… Our sample size is just two for now, so it’s slow going. Even so, Hikari-hakase can tell that they seem to be mutating over time. And we’ve got Netto working on a way to automatically recognize them, so we can know right away what we’re dealing with. Hopefully, pretty soon, we’ll also be able to learn something about where they're coming from.”

Having explained all of that, Meiru regarded Aon thoughtfully. Roll caught her eye, and Meiru gave her a nod; now seemed to be as good a time as any.

“But, y’know, Aon-san… I think you really hit on something important, earlier, saying you weren’t ready to handle all of that yet,” Roll ventured.

“Yeah,” Meiru agreed, calmly friendly. “I’m glad you felt like we were trustworthy enough to share that with.”